This invention relates to the field of automated ballot tabulating machines. More particularly, a ballot secrecy sleeve is presented which covers the ballot as it is being fed into an automatic tabulating machine.
Through the years democracy has provided numerous ways of voting and tabulating vote counts. One of the earliest modem versions of voting mechanisms involved a paper ballot. On a paper ballot the names of the candidates are listed and a box is placed next to each candidates name. The voter simply marks an xe2x80x9cxxe2x80x9d in the appropriate box to vote for the candidate. These votes are then hand-counted after visual inspection and the tabulated count delivered to the proper election authority.
Since oftentimes tens of millions of votes need to be tabulated in order to determine the winner of a contest, much attention has been devoted to more sophisticated means of voting and tabulating the vote count. A particular improvement to the paper ballot method was thought to be the use of voter punch cards. In utilizing this type of voting apparatus, a punch card is inserted into a pre-determined matrix containing the candidates"" names. The voter then punches through a chad in order to register his vote.
Unfortunately, punch cards resulted in a certain amount of error since the chad would occasionally not be punched all the way through or would be left hanging onto the back of the ballot to be tabulated. The use of punch cards has fallen into much disfavor since the recent problems with tabulating the correct vote in the Year 2000 Presidential Election in the State of Florida and elsewhere. Advancements are needed in order to more correctly count every vote.
A further advancement over the paper ballot or punch card ballot is the electronically scanned ballot. The electronically scanned ballot uses a ballot with a box or oval next to the candidate""s name. However, rather than marking the appropriate box or oval with an xe2x80x9cxxe2x80x9d the voter simply fills in the oval so that the ballot can be scanned by an electronic scanning apparatus Once the voter has cast his vote, the ballot is fed into an electronic tabulating machine that easily and accurately tabulates the voter""s preferences based on the ovals that were filled in during the balloting process. It is believed that the electronic scanning of ballots is much more accurate and less prone to human error or to other inaccurate and subjective methods of determining a voter""s true intention.
However, with the advent of electronic balloting, the secrecy of the ballot has been compromised because the voter has to place his ballot into the ballot slot on the electronic tabulating machine. Even though this ballot slot has a secrecy cover, a portion of the ballot can still be viewed as it is being fed into the tabulating machine. If a bystander is able to view any portion of the ballot, he would be able to visually check the voter""s candidate selections. This lack of secrecy is very disturbing to voters and to election officials who try to maintain the secrecy of the vote to the fullest extent possible.
There has thus become a need for some sort of secrecy protection device that would enable the voter to cast a ballot to be scanned in a completely secret method. It is an object of this invention to provide a method of protecting the secrecy of a ballot even when it is to be scanned by an electronic tabulating machine.
Since voting is done by a wide variety of eligible citizens, it is also important to keep the voting process itself as simple as possible. It is another object of this invention to provide a simple, yet effective, means of covering a voter""s cast ballot until it is fed into the electronic tabulating machine.
Other and further objects of this invention will become apparent upon reading the below described Specification.
A ballot secrecy sleeve is presented to protect the secrecy and privacy of a ballot once it has been marked by a voter. The sleeve comprises a cardboard cover which has an identical top and bottom connected by a narrow shoulder. The narrow shoulder has a small cutout to enable the voter to push the ballot into the tabulating mechanism once the ballot secrecy sleeve has been positioned in the ballot slot. The sleeve also has left and right flanges so that the sleeve and ballot can be placed into the ballot tabulating slot with the ballot being completely hidden either by the cover of the machine itself or by the secrecy sleeve. The left and right flanges insure that the ballot and sleeve are positioned in the ballot machine-receiving slot in the proper orientation. Once the ballot and sleeve have been properly positioned, the ballot is pushed into the tabulating machine using a cutout and the ballot receiving and advancing rollers advance the ballot out of the sleeve for tabulation. The ballot is completely hidden from the time the voter places it into the ballot secrecy sleeve until the time it is tabulated.